SCO Revives with USD 100 Million Investment

Having almost disappeared completely late last year, SCO says it has been resuscitated by a new financing plan. Under the terms of the deal, Stephen Norris Capital Partners and “its partners from the Middle East” will supply up to $100 million, enabling SCO to reorganize and launch a new series of products. SNCP will gain a controlling interest in the company, and take it private, allowing it to slip out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Update: As part of the reorganisation, Darl McBride will be let go. Buried in the proposed MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between Unix vendor and Linux litigator SCO and SNCP is the note that “upon the effective date of the Proposed Plan of Reorganization, the existing CEO of the Company, Darl McBride, will resign immediately.”

Well, here are a few details that may give you a new impression of how The Deal works.

They are putting up $2 million in a trust to pay off current stockholders. Don’t want to drive away [the small] investors now, do they? Well. that’s about $0.091/share. This news has pushed the stock price up to $0.105, so the soon-to-be-losers in the lawsuit lottery have already lined up and paid their money to be suckered.

They are providing a line of credit for the SCOfflaws to pay Novell and IBM and their other creditors, such as the local pizza company and their expert witlesses that didn’t help them in court (no mention of RedHat’s Lanham Act suit), @ 17% interest… How much liability is there down the road? Unknown, possibly in excess of a $billion or two? But at that interest rate it at least makes a great write-off in case the investment company scores big on something that actually succeeds.

They do intend to take it private. But if Novell gets $30 million and IBM gets a settlement on the order of multi-hundreds of $millions (possibly $billions if they claim intentional malfeasance, just their legal expenses are running close to $40 million already) then that line of credit and the APR that comes with it will be less valuable than a SCOsource Pee In Your Eye license (no refunds if they lose, but users requested the license to compensate us for our Eye Pee, yeah, right).

Why do I have a feeling that due to some loophole, they are no longer in bankruptcy protection, but still not obligated to pay back any of their former debt (ie. to Novel)?

Basically when a company files for bankruptcy protection, anyone that has any monetary interest in that company becomes a creditor (including the stockholders).

While in bankruptcy protection, these creditors are basically involved in negotiations with the court and the company to come to an agreement on how the company will emerge from bankruptcy. In many cases, the biggest creditors end up becoming partial owners of the company based on the amount they are owed – other times they simply remain a creditor once the company emerges.

My guess is that the $100M is primarily being used to payoff some creditors – possibly for amounts quite a bit smaller than was owed (this is usually part of the negotiations). This will allow SCO to emerge without fear of being sued and liquidated into oblivion by their remaining creditors.

It can be different for any scenario – in the end, SCO will be privately held, and the smaller stockholders will get the biggest shaft.

At the end of the day, the companies assets are distributed among the secured creditors, and whatever is left over gets divied among the unsecured ones.

SCO’s common stock is not secured, so the shareholders would most likely have nothing left to show after the dissolution of the company.

This is why Novell was pushing to court to annex funds from SCO prior to allowing them to file chapter 11; a court order doesn’t make them a secured creditor, and they didn’t want to see the cash that SCO still had on hand being divied up to anyone else.

It still begs the question, though, of what assets, intangible or not, that SCO is holding and would encourage an investment of this sort. I can’t believe that whatever is left of their customer base is worth that much as an acquisition, and I think the courts have nullified SCO’s IP claims. Anybody investing in SCO at this point is holding out that they may still have legal fuel left to sue the world. Or somebody is hoping optimistically that IBM will relent and just buyout SCO to make the lawsuit go away, which is unlikely at this point. It’s curious.

My guess is that the $100M is primarily being used to payoff some creditors – possibly for amounts quite a bit smaller than was owed (this is usually part of the negotiations). This will allow SCO to emerge without fear of being sued and liquidated into oblivion by their remaining creditors.

I don’t think SCO had that much in outstanding debt/liability, they could easily pay down their debt, even with Novell and their law firm, and still have cash left over. So something fishy is going on here.

It can be different for any scenario – in the end, SCO will be privately held, and the smaller stockholders will get the biggest shaft.

Well, that is certainly true, except that all stockholders will probably get the biggest shaft. The smart ones dumped it long ago, anyways, and the execs have either cashed out or probably cut side deals prior to this financing being arranged.

Just to clarify, if a company is being dissolved, it ceases to exist. Finished forever. The assets are sold off and the proceeds go to creditors. Common shareholders get nothing, unless there is a surplus remaining after all creditor claims are settled (very unlikely).

But SCO isn’t being dissolved, it’s merely in bancrupcy. So what will happen with the SCO stock? I think it’ll probably be cancelled and a new stock will be issued when the company emerges from bancrupcy.

But SCO isn’t being dissolved, it’s merely in bancrupcy. So what will happen with the SCO stock? I think it’ll probably be cancelled and a new stock will be issued when the company emerges from bancrupcy.

It’s in chapter 11 and trying to avoid chapter 7. I thought that “private” meant no publically traded stock?

But then, SCO Group has always been privately owned, for most practical purposes. The investors have traditionally been a small, close knit group. Any resemblance that SCO’s maneuvering might bear to 1980’s TV series like Dallas, Falcon Crest, and Dynasty are purely *not* conincidental.

In this season’s cliff hanger, J.R.^WDarl has gotten the boot. Miss Elly is still tied up in a basement somewhere. Angela just got the winery back, after living at the Del Oro spa for most of a season. Southfork is on fire. And we are all praying that this is really just Pam’s dream.

SCO is a publicly-traded company; it was originally listed on NASDAQ but now trades on the Pink Sheets, the stock market’s ward for the terminally ill. Most of the stock may have been held by the company insiders in the past, but today they hold only 33% combined. Insiders probably got out during any of the many stock-pumping lawsuit schemes.

Perhaps in the past the company execs and insiders did own a majority of the company’s stock, but it seems that none of the stock is currently owned by company executives; the execs probably sold their shares during one of the many stock-pumping lawsuits.

Perhaps in the past the company execs and insiders did own a majority of the company’s stock, but it seems that none of the stock is currently owned by company executives; the execs probably sold their shares during one of the many stock-pumping lawsuits.

Anyone else notice a “one off” bug? What I have noticed is that, consistently, posts do not show up on the site until someone else makes another post after it. The story might show “1 post”, but none are actually visible if one looks. When it shows that there are two posts, the first becomes visible. And where it shows three, the second becomes visible.

However SCO has been convicted of converting Novell’s funds to their own use. This makes them criminally liable. The hearing on April 29th is to determine the amount that they are liable for. That does make them a secured creditor in the anount determined once the trial that they had put on hold resumes. Since the money was acquired through criminal means Novell gets paid BEFORE the other creditors.

” They lost the previous cases and then filed for bankruptcy protection just before Novel/IBM etc. were able to seek damages.”

The IBM case never got concluded, that still has to go through the system first.

” It was determined that Novel is the rightful owner of UNIX.”

No it wasnt,

***The court found that Santa Cruz did obtain ownership and licensing rights to UNIX and UnixWare but that the pre-1996 copyrights were excluded.***

Translation: There are still appeals and other legal matters to sift through so that we can come to a conclusion. Novell holds copyrights to UNIX making them a copyright holder, not a owner of the UNIX system, that is the reason Novell just cant open source UNIX.

” So they now have the right to appeal the former cases and go back to court, but due to bankruptcy protection they are protected from having to pay Novell?”

They actually dont have to pay Novell anything until all appeals and other legal matters are done. So once again whether SCO wins, whether SCO loses its just a longer waiting game.

so this is where the money from those scam emails wound up going…. to breathe new life into SCO. well in times like this there is only one thing to do, “its time to kick @$$ and chew bubble gum, and I’m all out of gum.” (cut to a scene of duke nukem running into the sco building in what apears to be a post apocolyptic nightmear)

SCO has been pretty well disarmed by the court. They may really have no option but to try to make it with a legigimate business. Or (Where’s Waldo? Where’s Waldo?) maybe Microsoft thought there was still enough FUD value remaining to justify sinking, or persuading someone else to sink, $100M more into them. I doubt it, though. They are still under the consent decree in the US for another couple of years. The EU has taken notice of them. And you can bet that other governments around the world have taken note of the EU’s success. And even the piddly bit of success that the US has had. Balmer has clearly proclaimed that he considers Linux to be Microsoft’s top competitor. Can they really risk, at this point, to be caught red handed participating in an illegal scheme to destabilize their top competitor?

Many here may not be aware that SCO and Caldera both had pretty solid businesses not that many years ago. Before there *was* a Linux, SCO was the knight in shining armor representing Unix in the land of x86. Yeah, they made a lot of mistakes back then, like all the Unix vendors did.

But IMO, if the new owners jettisoned Darl and the gang, and made a go of it in a legitimate way, it would give me the warm fuzzies. Because before all this litigious crap started, and before Linux grew up in the late 90’s, SCO was my hero.

Yes, this is just a recycling of one of my previous posts. But recycling is good! 😉

Ubuntu is a strong member of our community, and the success that it has achieved in its area benefits us all. Just as with all the major distros, even if their areas of specialty do not lend themselves to garnering as large a number of users.

Stop throwing rocks at the pillars of our community. And by that, I don’t just mean Ubuntu, but all the players who benefit us so much. Players whose importance we do not recognize… until they are gone.

Yeah, I saw the smiley. But I lived through so much back stabbing and sour grapes reactions during the Unix wars that now I just jump in and say “that’s stupid” and ask questions later. 😉

err.. I was refering to the “great new products” they announced and which no doubt will take the crowd by storm… I am guessing Open Desktop here which will be an Open Server-spin-off. It’s all there – rock solid Unix foundations, slam KDE 4.0 on top – sorted! Costs you 699

Mr. Norris acted as a principal financial advisor to Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Al Saud of Kingdom Holding Company, in structuring and negotiating the re-capitalization of Citibank, which returned over $15 billion in profits on about $590 million of equity invested.

“Gates and Alwaleed have collaborated for at least two years. After attending a dinner at Gates’s home in Bellevue, Washington, in early 2004, Alwaleed agreed to explore ways to assist Microsoft’s expansion in Saudi Arabia.” This investment is all part of Microsoft’s ongoing battle of disruption against Linux.

This investment is probably not going to be directly and obviously profitable, but it might buy SCO more time for FUD.

Sure!! This is a completely reasonable offer to help them stay in business so that they can transition their unbelievable wireless products to .NET. Nothing to do with FUD, backroom backstabbing or Saudi Princes investing in dead operating system resellers who have NEVER EVER made a profit in their entire history (now that the court has ruled that the only profit they ever declared was Novell’s money which tSCOg illegally converted to their own use).

Besides, that’s not a black helicopter, it’s an IBM lawyer. One of a sizeable group referred to as the Nazgul…

Before people get to negative, SCO dose have two versions of UNIX, some other productsand a customer base and I’m sure there are enough people working there (just not the ones leading the company the last few years) that know that selling a product to customers is good way to make money.

Besides, the article sounds a bit like SCO is going to get coped up and sold of in portions. Either way, there is still some money to be made for the vultures.

They have SCO OpenServer. Which is pretty outdated, but has a certain following among business accounting and point of sale ISVs. Unixware is not quite so outdated, but I can’t say much about it because I am less familiar with it. It’s what System V Release 4 became.

If I were one of the ISV’s dependent upon OpenServer, I think I would have jumped ship long before now. But I’ve spoken with reps of a couple of them… *technical representatives*… and they seemed pretty dense. Tried to tell me that they needed SCO for their customers because it was easy to use, whereas RedHat was difficult and cryptic. You know how you can be having a conversation with someone and they suddenly say something so bizarre that you look around to make sure that you have a clear shot at the exit and carefully back away? That’s just what I did.

I haven’t kept up. But it would not surprise me if some of these companies have retained their faith in SCO even to this day, despite all the evidence which should have sent any sane company runnning for cover.

Comparing the Middle East with Al-QaÃ¯da is not so much racism, but it is stigmatization. It is if I where to keep comparing North America with the KKK. Indeed not a good thing to do on a site with an international audience.

I’ve noticed that the “mod-downers” are very quick on the keyboard. The “mod-uppers” read and think. And then mod… or decline to mod… accordingly.

Humor is a particlularly thorny concept for those quick-on-the-draw detractors whom we face even on forums where we might naively think we wouldn’t have to worry about such things.

And the person who is the provider of the humor is in a bit of a dilemma. Should one include so many smileys that it drowns what was intended to be a dry… very dry… joke? Or should one simply post and let the hot heads have a field day, hoping that saner, and more fun loving heads prevail?

“HAY ALEX WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DONT GET IT? THE TERRORISTS BOUGHT SCO!! HAHAHAH”

You know, I thought long and hard about whether or not I should further explain myself in my original post. I was really hoping you guys would be able to realize that the humor was not missed on me–that that was not what I meant when I said I didn’t detect any satire. He obviously was making a joke. My point was that the joke was made on an understood implication that “all middle-easterners are terrorists,” which was never itself satirized.

Why not? They’ve sued their business partner, their upstream license provider, attacked the community which gave Caldera life in the first place, And they are being represented in bankruptcy court by one of their larger creditors.

If this were on TV, I’d turn it off, on account of it being too unbelievable to even bother with.

Darl has already pulled down some serious coin from SCO, Ikon, Novell, SBI, and others. People who were hoping to see him selling pencils in the airport or washing windshields at traffic lights are going to be sorely disappointed. He’ll move on to something new and different. Same old, same old, keep moving, folks…

You’re right, of course. But sometimes the universe has a way of doling out justice in a circuitous way. Wouldn’t surprise me if Darl doesn’t have an unplanned meeting with Rod Serling in his future. And *that* would be an eppisode that I would most certainly want to tape.

But aside from that… I wonder how much pride and personal satisfaction he derives from being Darl McBride? Sometimes, the justice is served from within. I don’t care how much money he made out of all this; I wouldn’t trade places with him.

You’re right, of course. But sometimes the universe has a way of doling out justice in a circuitous way. Wouldn’t surprise me if Darl doesn’t have an unplanned meeting with Rod Serling in his future. And *that* would be an eppisode that I would most certainly want to tape.

I can almost picture that episode. Darl discovers that no computer will *ever* allow him to login. 😉

But aside from that… I wonder how much pride and personal satisfaction he derives from being Darl McBride? Sometimes, the justice is served from within. I don’t care how much money he made out of all this; I wouldn’t trade places with him.

Good question. But, given that few people outside of the geek world have even heard the guy’s name and he probably views the whole thing has a contract dispute gone wrong, I don’t think that he’s feeling too badly. That said, I doubt that companies are lining up to have themselves driven into the ground by Darl.

If SCO has no chance and IF Linux indeed doesn’t violate Unix IP, then they will die. For right now, sit back and enjoy the show. I dont trust Novell and as always I will wait for this thing to go to court and come to a conclusion based on fact, not on a decision based on demonizing of a company

I will wait for this thing to go to court and come to a conclusion based on fact, not on a decision based on demonizing of a company

Oh, come on. How much evidence do you need? Judge Dale Kimball, after giving SCO every benefit of every doubt, and all the rope they have asked for, has already expressed surprise that with all of that, they have failed to produce any credible evidence to support their cases.

Legal protocol must be observered, of course. But you are being unreasonable, IMO, to reserve forming any opinion, given the dearth of evidence which SCO has been able to produce in 5 years of legal proceedings. Being cautious is one thing. But one can be so overly cautious as to cross the line into irrationality.